I've been covering the video game space for 20 years for outlets like The Washington Post, Reuters, CNET, AOL, Wired Magazine, Yahoo!, Entertainment Weekly, NBC, Variety, Maxim, EGM, and ESPN. I serve as EIC of GamerHub.tv and co-founder of GamerHub Content Network, a video game and technology video syndication network that works with Tribune and DBG to syndicate game videos and editorial around the world. I also cover games for outlets like The Hollywood Reporter, IGN, Geek Monthly, CNN, DigitalTrends and PrimaGames.

With the world awaiting the Xbox Reveal at Microsoft’s Bellevue headquarters on May 21, gamers are anticipating a fall launch for the two consoles that will define next generation gaming – Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft next Xbox, currently codenamed Durango. With the first blurry teaser trailer of the new console online today, Sony did lead with what’s important — games. A couple of the top game developers for Sony’s PS4 offer their thoughts on what gamers can expect from next gen gaming.

Guerilla Games has been working on Killzone Shadow Fall, its first PS4 game, with a team of 150 people. Hermen Hulst, managing director and co-founder of the Amsterdam-based studio, said that the team sizes for Killzone 2 and 3 were about 125 people. The increase in manpower was to handle the transition to next gen. The development time for his studio remained just six months longer than current gen at two-and-a-half years. Once ramped up, that window should come down to the current two year development cycle of current consoles.

“It’s actually quite comparable in terms of development size and time, but if you look at the scale of what we’re doing and the detail — not just the assets, but also the more believable detailed animation and the effects — a lot of the effort has gone into tools making sure that we can develop smart games. We’ve learned a thing or two on previous installments on PlayStation 3, so it’s not as scary as maybe some people led you to believe. If you look at the games we’ve already shown, they’re a lot more advanced than previous console launches. Developers were able to quickly get to grips with (the PS4) and show something up and running on the actual hardware. That’s a testament to being able to work with the hardware.”

Killzone has been one of the flagship first-party shooters for Sony’s consoles and portables. A new game is launching for PS Vita from Sony Cambridge, Killzone Mercenaries. With no new Resistance currently planned, according to Insomniac Games founder Ted Price, Killzone will be a key killer app to entice gamers to invest in the new PS4 hardware.

“What we’re trying to do is create a more vibrate environment and that requires a lot of different elements to come together,” said Hulst. You can build a large city, but you want to populate it and you want to have the world acknowledge you. You want to have all of these little things working and push the quality on all those things and that means you need the hardware to support that. The hardware is really focused on pushing the notion of immediacy and I think that’s going to be really important to the gameplay experience. This is next gen. This is how we bring to life a vibrant city and hopefully we’re going to bring in a lot of these new elements with the new console.”

Sony recently confirmed that Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 6 will launch this fall on PlayStation 3. There’s no word yet on when GT6 might make the leap to PS4. But one thing that might be holding it back is Sony’s new racing IP from Evolution Studios, Drive Club. That racing sim is confirmed for the PS4 launch and it’s unlikely Sony wants to compete with itself in this genre for such a small launch audience.

“Drive Club is a game that we’ve wanted to make for many years,” said Matt Southern, Studio Game Director at Evolution Studios. “It’s really a simple concept with racing only the very best cars in the world at the best places in the world. We looked at the success of first-person shooters this generation and asked ourselves what were the core reasons why those games have been so much more popular than racing games online. We decided it was because with racing games, typically there’s only one winner, so we wanted to make a racing game built around teams. This allows players to share in the rewards of being in a racing club.”

One of the perks of being a game developer is getting behind the wheel of the fastest cars in the world. The more successful developers can also buy those cars. Southern has sat in a Ferrari 599XX and he said no game has really been able to recreate that incredible feeling of being in that driver’s seat.

“(PlayStation 4) hardware has allowed us to focus massively on creating new types of gameplay experiences rather than the old school definition of next gen, but it still at the same time allowed us to do that kind of next gen exploration,” said Southern. “We have about 110 developers on our team and the vast majority of them have a very unhealthy obsession with cars. We’ve used that obsession and the power of the machine to bring Drive Club to life.”

Driving games have been a mainstay for any console or technology launch, partly because the games offer photorealistic worlds and an environment that even non-gamers can relate to – being behind the wheel. Southern said that 10 years ago, when they came up with the pitch for Drive Club, the then-independent development studio wanted sumptuous levels of details from the real-world locations to the actual cars.

“We wanted people to feel like you were in that real place,” said Southern. “The technology wasn’t there for PlayStation 2 and when PlayStation3 came along we wanted to celebrate being lifted from the constraints of a license and come up with something truly insane and really found something special with MotorStorm, so we parked Drive Club never forgetting about it. Then when PlayStation 4 came around this presented the perfect platform for our original vision and that focus on racing clubs.”

In addition to creating the new game, Evolution Studios worked with Sony in designing the new PS4 controller. Southern said the studio wanted to “nail the feeling of emulating a steering wheel because there’s no better way to play racing games.”

Sony outlined five principles for its next gen game development for PS4, which includes the keywords: simple, immediate, social, integrated and personal.

“I get much more excited about the new ways to play as opposed to a deep dive into the (next gen) technology,” said Hulst. “When we were first exposed to the five principles, we were thrilled because we’ve had this idea for Killzone Shadow Fall for a very long time and when we were involved in the discussion about immediacy and personalization and social gaming and accessibility, we felt like we could show Sony this game that we’d trademarked and concepted even before we were a part of the company. It was the promise of the experience for me that was the real exciting thing. I just love making games for new consoles. There’s nothing cooler or more exciting for a game developer.”

That excitement will build after May 21 as both Sony and Microsoft prepare to showcase new gameplay on June 10 and then allow the industry to get hands-on with software for the first time at E3 2013 in Los Angeles June 11-13.

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I bought a PS 3 on launch day with heavy excitement to continue playing my favorite franchise, Socom. What I got was a cheap stripped down version missing more then half the features made by a new rookie dev with Confrontation and then just a complete slap in the face to the fans with Socom 4 which didn’t have a single shred of Socom in it. They overhauled and butchered the game to try to appeal to the COD fans and killed the franchise along with the original developer Zipper who got shut down. Sony has adamantly refused to make the Socom game the fans have been waiting for and ran the franchise into the dirt chasing some other audience that didn’t care about Socom.

Through this experience I have learned to never trust any Sony exclusives cause if I like a game I know they will butcher it in the sequel in the name of “appealing to a broader/casual audience”. It would taking nothing short of a true full featured hardcore Socom game made for the fans to convince me to ever buy another Sony product. After the way they strung the fans along and lied to us to try to get us to buy their broader market experiment they should do the fans a solid for a change. No fanbase has been screwed harder in the history of video games then the Socom fans were.

Despite all the hoopla, both systems will fail electronically like the previous consoles. Paying $500+ per console, having it break, needing a new laser lens…will cost more money to the consumer, especially when you have to send it back to MS or Sony waiting 6 weeks to get it back. Everyone thought the previous xbox and ps were inferior to breaking down. I repaired 1000′s of these consoles since 05